House-Hunting as Vacation

VACATIONING in Panama last spring, Chris Stanley complemented fishing and beach lounging with seminars on the ins and outs of buying property overseas.

When Mr. Stanley, who lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., thought about buying a home in Latin America, he decided he needed a primer. So he booked a seven-day trip with Tropical Pathways, a Texas company that runs real estate tours to Panama.

Days spent with real estate agents, loan officers and lawyers were followed by tours of high-rise condos, golf course residences, mountain homes and grand beachfront houses that were for sale.

“My main goal was to get a sense of the real estate market,” he said. “I could have done it myself, but it would have taken longer to put together and probably would have been more expensive.”

A month later, he bought a home, now under construction, on a golf course just outside Panama City.

As the second-home market in Latin America has emerged, so has a cottage industry of tour operators eager to attract foreign buyers seeking vacation retreats and investment properties. Part vacation, part real estate boot camp, such trips walk potential home buyers through the legal and financial particulars of overseas ownership, as well as whisking them on tours of homes and developments on the market.

Tropical Pathways (www.tropicalpathways.com) runs tours to Panama, the north coast of the Dominican Republic, the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico and Roatan, an island off the coast of Honduras. The seven-day Panama tour is $1,399 a person, double occupancy, and includes accommodations, daily breakfast and lunch, and transportation throughout the country.

There are also seven-day tours to Roatan and the Dominican Republic, at $1,249 and $1,299, and a four-day Mexico trip for $850. The Panama trip, for example, starts in Panama City before traveling to the mountain town of Boquete and on to Bocas del Toro on the Caribbean.

“It’s a moving workshop,” said Lyle Burke, Tropical Pathways’ founder. Properties shown on a given tour range from $150,000 Panama City condominiums to large beachfront houses at $2 million.

While Mr. Burke readily tells tourgoers that he earns a fee if they buy a property (it’s not unusual for a tour participant to spend $350,000 on a condo), he said “there is no sales pressure.”

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International Living, an Irish firm that runs seminars that lay out the basics of overseas home-buying and living, spun off a tour company, Pathfinder, to lead tours, for example, in Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua (www.internationalliving.com; click on Events then Real Estate Tours). This fall and winter, Pathfinder plans trips to Panama City, Panama’s Pacific coast and Highlands, and Nicaragua.

Prices vary, but start at $125 a person for multiday trips that include accommodations, transportation in the country and meals.

Camilla Sands started her tour company, Simply San Miguel (www.simplysanmiguel.com), with some 15 different vacation options for visitors to San Miguel de Allende in the Sierra Madres of central Mexico, but she says it is her Real Estate Curious Tour that gets the most bookings.

Topics addressed on the six-night trip — which costs $1,285 (double occupancy) with hotels, local transportation and some meals — include health care and home insurance. Tourgoers also meet architects and designers who can advise on how to comply with the town’s strict architectural guidelines.

While real estate is the focus, Ms. Sands said: “We don’t overdo it every day. I consider it a tour as well as a vacation.”

By the middle of the trip, she said, most attendees have decided whether they want to concentrate more on the real estate hunt. If not, she said, there are plenty of other traditional and more leisurely alternatives to hoofing it through homes.

“They can go shopping,” she said, “or I can arrange for them to take a cooking class.”